In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

80 thorough and nuanced analysis, preceded by a summary of the earlier conversation. But no one at dinner saw fit to re-discuss my hairs, and conversation turned to other matters. Such as this story from Tom: Army recruiters are apparently scouting the parking lots of supermarkets and the like, aiming to capture young people leaving their minimum-wage jobs for the day. Tom’s nephew works at a suburban Jewel supermarket, and a recruiter approached him in the parking lot and started his pitch. The nephew listened and gave him his phone number. The nephew has no intention of joining up. He’s a senior in high school bound for college in the fall. The Jewel isn’t the end of the line for him; he works there because his family has a strong work ethic. This is what surprised me: He didn’t feign interest in order to be mean or to be a prankster. It was instead part of a thought-out effort to protect the recruiter. The kid was afraid that the man would be sent to Iraq if he didn’t provide enough names of live prospects, and he wanted to delay the recruiter’s deployment. He wanted to keep him safe. He also had caller id so he could avoid the man’s phone calls. We ate at Caliente up the street. Lora, by chance, was at the next table. She didn’t talk about my hair either. APRIL 24. HENNA, HEAD, AND ANKLE (IN RETROSPECT) How long does it take to henna a head? It depends on whether you read the directions first. I didn’t. I went to Sharon’s Sunday evening, and we figured out how to use the stencil from ChemoChicks.com. The process is too tedious to describe, but involved eucalyptus oil and cutting and taping paper with designs on it, mixing up the henna potion, pushing the potion from a plastic cone to a plastic applicator bottle. If I’d read the directions beforehand, I would have known that the henna paste had to sit for a couple of hours after mixing. Sharon followed the stencil and made some designs of her own, and wrote us out of iraq on the back of my head. The henna felt cool and pleasant on my scalp. She said it was like decorating a cake, except the applicator bottle is hard plastic and required Herculean squeezing. The henna wasn’t dry by the time I went to bed, so I had to wrap toilet paper around my head before I went to sleep. 81 The designs are quite beautiful and swirly, and I feel dressed, not bald. The henna is hard and black but will flake off and be less pronounced. I am so glad I have a decorated scalp. I was in Trader Joe’s tonight in the soup-olives-peanut butter aisle and a little girl said something to her father about funny hair. I said: I don’t have any hair. I have designs on my head. You have to choose one or the other, I said, hair or designs. I didn’t feel bad at all. I think I would have felt much more self-conscious if my head was bare. I remember that a pregnant woman sold space on her belly in exchange for Super Bowl tickets. Three people so far have suggested I sell advertising space on my head. My friend Jodi in Madison wonders if short people will be able to read the back of my head, and if I’ll need a T-shirt to explain my head. APRIL 25. A CANCER BITCH BEHAVING BADLY Yesterday I went out lightly dressed and didn’t mean to be gone all day, but I was. And it got colder and colder (52 degrees). Around 8 p.m. or so I walked the half mile from Letizia’s Natural Bakery on Division near Damen, where I had a latte and a chocolate chip biscotto* and did some editing work, over to Ashland to get the bus. The bus came. I got off at Addison and waited in the drizzle for the Addison bus. When I exited at Clark, it was still raining. There was a Cubs game and I was going to cut through the parking lot, but some young guys in Cubs-type uniforms were standing bunched up near the entrance and said, You can’t go through the parking lot. I said, Why? He...

Share